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Jean-Michel Basquiat enjoys a stratospheric following – earlier this year, a 1982 oil painting by the late 20th-century great became the most expensive work by a U.S. artist ever sold at auction.

Out of the more than 2,000 works of art that Basquiat produced, New York's Museum of Modern Art has just 10 drawings and silk screens, the Whitney has six, the Metropolitan two, the Brooklyn Museum another two and the Guggenheim one.

"There's a lot of racism," Holman says, "and a lot of white privilege in the idea that only white people are important artists".

Unlike his contemporaries, Basquiat never received a large solo exhibition at a New York museum during his lifetime, says Jordana Moore Saggese, an associate professor at the California College of the Arts, and the author of the only art history monograph of Basquiat.

They were "deeply divided over the question of whether an artist could be both commercially successful and critically significant," she told AFP.

During his lifetime and even more so now, few museums can afford to acquire Basquiat's work.